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Design and rebuild

9 June 2001

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

YOU conscientiously collect paper, glass and plastics for recycling—so
how about recycling your home as well? Salvaging materials from a demolished
building and reusing them could halve the amount of raw materials that have to
be dug up to build a new one, and cut the energy needed by 10 per cent,
according to research in Japan.

“Construction trash is a big problem,” says Weijun Gao at Waseda University’s
Advanced Research Institute for Science and Engineering in Tokyo. Japan
currently builds twice as many new homes as the US, and during the 1990s the
country’s construction …